art

The world is filled with unique and amazing ways to show pictures of your family. From kitchen back splashes to window screens there are so many unique and awesome ways to enjoy the images of your life.

Last month I posted some beautifully stunning portraits, most of which used unconventional mediums like embroidery and screw heads to create truly beautiful works of art. These use more conventional mediums… but are anything but conventional.

Paul Cadden

After : Graphite on cartridge Paper A1 (yes, that means pencil on paper)

Although the drawings and paintings I make are based upon photographs, videos stills etc , the idea is to go beyond the photograph. The photo is used to create a subtler and much more complex focus on the subject depicted, The virtual image becomes the living image, an intensification of the normal.

I am interested in the choices we make to express ourselves to our world. The most apparent form of this is our clothes. We create an environment around ourselves to inform others how we desire to be perceived. By quilting I am initiating a dialogue between the immediate environments we create for ourselves, and the environments we inhabit. Where cloth, what we know to respond to as clothes, becomes the language of my work. The cloth becomes the medium that I use to create images and scenes rather than conceal and contain.

When I ran across more photos of Hakone Pavilion by Tezuka Architects (which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago) I began to wonder how many other fun and beautiful play spaces there are out there for kids. It turns out there are a lot of them… and they’re amazing. I can’t imagine the excitement that I would have had to be able to play in some of these environments. Alright, yes, I would still be excited. Wouldn’t you?

If your kid would flip out over having a picture of him or herself riding a dinosaur but have had their dreams slightly thwarted by that pesky little extinction issue, never fear! The impossible is now possible. Not only that, but it’s quite affordable. All you need to do is go to Dinoprints.com, pick out your dinosaur, upload a photograph of your kid looking like he’s ready to ride and you’re good to go. The results speak for themselves.

Dinoprints was conceived in December 2010 when my brother Steve asked if I would help with a Christmas idea he had for his son. Steve found an illustration of a Tyrannosaurus Rex online, and also happened to have a digital picture of his son sitting on the back of a horse. We superimposed Steve’s son onto the dinosaur’s back, printed it out and had it framed for his son who, like most kids, is crazy about dinosaurs!

Oh, man. This is one of those projects that makes me cry. Then, I tell myself to knock it off. Then, I look at it again and the tears start. So, I’m going to say it, this project is special.

Dear Photograph,
New Year’s resolutions and 30 years gone by…what was that little boy inside of me thinking about so long ago? I hope I never quit chasing that little boy’s dreams. It’s what matters most.
Scott

Are you crying? No?

Dear Photograph,

Thank you for giving my husband one more time to hold his grandmother in his arms. She passed away before we could get to her side in Costa Rica.

Well, I had these semi-high falutin notions of my first blog post being about the nature of art and why art is important – and why art of kids is important but then this passed by me on the interwebs (via Colossal Art & Design) and it communicates better than I would. It’s an installation by the fascinating artist Yayoi Kusama , entitled The Obliteration Room at Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane. (Runs through March 12.)

It’s stunningly beautiful in it’s simplicity and impact. It also answers, with frightening clarity, what will happen if you give the kids who visit your museum a bunch of stickers and a place to stick them.

If you’ve ever experienced an entirely flat white room, you know how stunningly disorienting it is. This already disorienting room just becomes more so after the kids ‘obliterate’ it. I love that.

It makes me think about:

boundless energy,

space and how we perceive it,

the nature of joy and how to create it,

what it’s like to be a kid and the wonder of not having boundaries,

how I would love to work at this museum so that I could visit the installation regularly and

all those little hands!

For me this piece is about what it is to be a kid. Kusama perfectly creates a canvas and tools that react to the natural instincts of a kid to leave their mark and express themselves in an environment. (It also carries with it a message that kids take your nice clean home/life and obliterate it with their energy, but that seems like a discussion for another day.) It makes me stop and think and feel. That, to me, is the difference between making pictures and making art.

So, it looks like this is the first blog post. I hope you find it interesting cuz… I think that there will be lots of stuff like this. I intend to write about the art of living (with kids) and the interconnectedness of it all. There will be a lot of thoughts on our world, our place in it and how there is or can be beauty and art in our everyday lives.